More skirmishes in the livestock wars

by DON STONEMAN

When a Premium Pork barn roof collapsed under the weight of snow in early January, Hayden called the Workman's Compensation Board to complain about what he calls "unsafe working conditions." He regularly pesters the municipal office to find out about building permits. Though Knip shrugs it off, Hayden is now stirring the pot again and Knip resents the incursion into what he considers to be private information.

"The municipalities say that these barns are being built by young entrepreneurs," scoffs Hayden as he hands a copy of a property description to a reporter sitting across the kitchen table in his farmhouse on the edge of Nairn. Hayden is expounding on one of his favourite themes -- that municipalities are too soft on granting manure exemptions to big pig companies and that the province is more interested in racking up export sales than in preserving the environment.

Hayden had visited the local registry office and spent a few dollars to search titles on some of the properties in the area -- properties on which single buildings, each housing several thousand breeding animals, are located. He points out that the title on a particular property now owned by Premium Pork has changed hands a number of times in the last eight years and the lenders have changed as well. Big businesses in the United States own these farms now, he asserts.

It proves nothing of the sort, bristles Knip, who asserts that all the title search shows is that the farms' owners carry mortgages. He refuses to comment on the references in the title search, pointing out that country registry offices were set up as a clearing houses for information that would let property owners get credit and "not so that special interest groups can go and publish it. I've been title-searched before," Knip says. "I ignored it and it went away."

So goes another skirmish in the livestock wars being fought across the province and across Canada. The wars divide communities and families. A positive image of agriculture is a casualty and a huge amount of energy and money gets diverted away from farming into public relations efforts and cleaning up messes.

Looking for trouble
While ROSA's Hayden was clearly performing a legal, if somewhat controversial, act when he dug up public information on the Premium Pork operations in Biddulph Township, not everyone is steering as straight a line.

One summer day last year, Huron county pig farmer Hans Soer was confronted by a strange sight on his farm, which borders on the Bluewater Highway north of Grand Bend. As Soer tells it, some citizens were walking along the bottom of what he calls "a ditch" which runs between his office and home and into the farm. The people, whom Soer didn't recognize, were taking water samples and they told him that they were within their rights to be there because they were walking in "a stream" that was "a public waterway."

The legality of that stroll up a trickle of a streambed is debatable. "They were walking in the ditch to see if they can find manure and things so they can make a hassle," Soer says.

Soer has reason to believe that some property owners in the area are looking for excuses to shut down his barn. Hans Soer and his brothers Gerrit and Tony run barns near Grand Bend as part of TPC (The Pork Corp) loop. Gerrit has a highly visible 2,000-head finishing barn on the former highway 83 east of Grand Bend while Tony runs two nursery barns and, with Hans, feeds pigs in a couple of 1,000-head converted beef barns.

Several years ago, a development was turned down west of the farm where Hans finishes pigs because the houses would have been too close to the century-old barn which had been renovated to hold 1,000 feeder pigs bedded on straw. The solid manure is stored on a concrete walled pad outside and covered with plastic to reduce leaching. If there was evidence of pollution, Soer says, he would be required to make expensive repairs which could put the barn out of business.

In Ashfield Township, members of Agricultural Livestock Expansion Response Team (ALERT) have been watching closely as hog powerhouse Acre T went to trial last month in Goderich on pollution charges related to alleged leaks from a newly built pig barn in May, 1999. A judgement is expected in April. ALERT will be asking a lot of questions at the Walkerton inquiry about building standards, says spokesperson Anita Frayne.

In South Perth, Cold Springs Farm's John Alderman has waited for months for a ruling on a finishing barn where Cold Springs can house pigs but isn't allowed to spread a gallon of liquid manure on nearby fields. You can't rush a judge, Alderman says. "You might not get the ruling you like." He figures that Cold Springs has spent well over $100,000 in legal fees.

Work with the community
The times have changed, says University of British Columbia applied sociologist and anthropologist Desmond Connor, who will be a featured speaker at Ontario Pork's annual meeting later this month. "In the old economy," he says, "development was king" and the environment took a backseat. In the new economy, the environment, society and community rule supreme, and development will be limited, Connor says. "You've got to get the area residents to buy into an operation of any size. Everybody has to win something."

Connor cites a Saskatchewan operation which made a successful integration into a community. The builder hired a construction crew from the area, in the winter, when work was hard to come by, and contracted feed supplies nearby. But most important, he says, if promises are made to keep a clean operation, the promises must be kept. If something goes wrong, you have to deal with it right away. Public meetings are "the last legal blood sport" and a forum where the new builder can't win. Open houses are far better, he says. But holding an open house "doesn't mean you have a golden wand that will preserve you from all subsequent problems."

In Ashfield Township, Acre T Farm held an open house for its new breeder barn. A few months later, the company was accused of allowing liquid manure to leak out of the bottom of the barn. A farm still has to be well managed and the systems have to work. "If somebody has an unfortunate accident (like Acre T), at least he has a more receptive public if he already had them (critics) on the farm."

The same principles apply whether an operation is large or small, Connor says. A new builder must reach out to the silent majority, Connor says, and understand the formal and informal communication systems in any community.

Public confidence in the pork industry has been one casualty in the livestock wars.

But all isn't lost, asserts a representative of another industry that also was plagued by bad smells and perceived environmental messes. There are strong parallels between animal agriculture and the paper industry, says Sylvie St-Laurent, director of communications programs for the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association. In the last five years, she boasts, the industry was able to turn around the public's perception of companies that generally make the public indignant by cutting down trees.

First, she points out, it was necessary to determine what Canadians think about the industry. The pulp industry quickly found that the things it was proud of -- financial success both nationally and internationally -- didn't mean much to the rest of Canada. "What mattered was being environmentally responsible, open and sharing. There was a big gap between who we were and what people thought. We had put a lot of capital into environmental controls, but no one recognized that," she says.

The poor reputation was costly in Ottawa, where the public's negative attitude to the pulp industry "made it difficult for the government to adapt policies that were counter-intuitive to public opinion."

Now the industry surveys public opinion every year, both to ascertain what the public thinks about it and also what message the industry should send out. Because the public had such a low opinion of the pulp and paper industry, "we couldn't go right out and tell them what a good job we were doing," St-Laurent says. "People wouldn't buy it, the level of distrust was so high." So the first messages were an invitation to the public to tour paper plants. It wasn't until this year that the message became a sort of bragging statement that the industry was doing things right.

Back in British Columbia, Connor notes that it's important to keep an eye on your resources and not spend them foolishly. "Sometimes you have to invoke the '20 per cent rule,'" Connor says. "Don't spend more than 20 per cent of your resources trying to convince your strongest opponents to change their thinking." You likely can't move them anyway and it's possible that they don't really represent the majority of thinking in the community where they live.

Meanwhile, back near Lucan Township, Charlie Hayden turns his sedan around in the driveway of a Premium Pork barn and wonders what is going up on a new building site. He complains about big, shareholder-driven agri-businesses cutting corners so that stock prices stay up. Hayden says he can't sell one of his nearby farms for its full value because no one can build on it.

When the big farms drive all the small farmers out of business, he says in a half serious tone, he will put together a "union" of farmers in the area and charge the big pig barn owners $100 an acre to apply their manure on the land. That way, he says, he'd be able to get the value of his property investment back. It's hard to say just how serious he is. BF

Trespassers take note

He thinks that they could likely be charged with trespassing, pointing out that the onus is on the defendants to prove that they had permission to be on the property. For the most part, however, the OPP officer prefers to err on the side of caution. Shropshall says farm properties should be posted with signs specifically prohibiting trespassing and that generally laneways and gates are considered to be an invitation to enter.

But the Ontario Federation begs to differ. The Trespass to Property Act is pretty clear as far as farmland goes, says Peter Jeffery, senior policy researcher. Under Section 3 of the act, signs aren't necessary to prohibit entry to gardens, fields and other lands under cultivation, including lawns orchards and vineyards, areas where planted trees have grown to less than two metres in height, and areas that are obviously fenced to keep animals in and people out. Also included are fields that are snow-covered, if there is a crop planted underneath.

Farmers should be careful about the signs that they post, Jeffery says. A sign that says "no hunting" may be interpreted as an invitation to hike, picnic or cross-country ski on the property, he says. BF

ROSA faces tough slog to get charitable status

Moreover, the ALERT groups raise their own funds, but lack charitable status so they can't issue tax receipts. Money can be donated, however, to the Canadian Environmental Defense Fund (CEDF), which supports legal challenges to specific cases.

ROSA is one of half dozen member groups concerned about what the coalition's literature describes as "the uncontrolled spread of intensive livestock operations and the field application of liquid manure." The group doesn't have a formal membership structure, says Mills, an organic farmer from Nairn, in northern Middlesex County. "We get a core group of 15 or 20 people for an ordinary meeting. If something's hot you can get a couple of hundred. Probably 100 people have given us money."

"We are told that it's a tough slog to get charitable status," Mills says. When the CEDF issues tax receipts for contributions, it keeps back a percentage for administration fees. Each case must be vetted by the CEDF board, which then negotiates a fee with the sponsoring organization. Mills says when the CEDF helped ROSA it charged a 10 per cent fee on donations over $1,000 and 15 per cent on donations less than $1,000. "Everyone is looking for help everywhere," says Mills. "It's hard for organizations to decide where they can be most effective." ALERT groups are willing to throw their support behind cases where a precedent might be set.

In January, Mills got a grant from River Watcher, the American environmental organization, to attend its conference in North Carolina. River Watcher appoints "watchers" to look for polluters and lays private charges against violators. Its website emphasizes the preservation of fish habitat.

Mills doesn't see ROSA running an American-style River Watcher program, at least not yet. "We don't really have a river here," although creeks in the area run into both the Ausable and Thames Rivers. Nor does ROSA have the resources. "We likely have the people," but they aren't trained to perform meaningful water testing, he says. It would cost about $5,000 to get a water testing program up and going, he says, noting that the Sierra Club could have a role in that. "That's something that the Sierra Club really shines at," he says. BF